Erik Akers

Well instead of get­ting one book review I’m going to give you a series of five books that is Logo Lounge. I first saw Logo Lounge One when I was still in col­lege and Logo Lounge Two had yet to be released. Within 10 sec­onds of look­ing through this book I knew I had to have it, so that night I got home at ordered it and pre-ordered Logo Lounge Two from Amazon.

What really drew me to this book was it was the first book I had ever seen that was noth­ing but logos, just pages and pages of logos. See when I first got into design I loved, still love, the process of cre­at­ing a new logo and iden­tity for some­body or some­thing. And one major part of my process was to at least look and see what was out there and I do this for two rea­sons. One, to do my best to make sure that I don’t flat out copy another design that has already been done. Two, hope­fully find some inspi­ra­tion for what­ever project I am work­ing on.

If you have tried search­ing for logos, just logos, on the inter­net you know it can be a long process that doesn’t end with great results. So find­ing a book that 100’s and 100’s of logo through out the pages was huge for me. It’s instant ref­er­ence mate­r­ial on-demand. So if I was cre­at­ing a logo based on the let­ter M, I could sim­ply flip to the pages that fea­tured M logos and see if there was any­thing that really stuck out to me. Plus the bonus that there have con­tin­ued to be new Logo Lounges put out there is just more and more ref­er­ence mate­r­ial to look through. Almost an end­less sup­ply, almost. So I ended up car­ry­ing around the first Logo Lounge book more then some text books.

I have with­out ques­tion pre-ordered every new Logo Lounge book when it’s became avail­able on Ama­zon. So now I have vol­umes 1 through 5 and when I have a client that wants me to design a new logo, after I have got­ten their input and ideas, the Logo Lounge Series is the first thing I grab to look through. Which way this is the first review because I view this series at the most impor­tant books I have in my design ref­er­ence library.

Since I’ve entered the “real world” the focus of my design work as taken me more into web design and devel­op­ment, mainly I think because I’m flu­ent in “nerd” or devel­op­ment speak, I still love every chance I get at cre­at­ing or updat­ing new logos and iden­ti­ties. That way I can still hold on to one of my dreams of try­ing to became the next Paul Rand. If you do any kind of logo work, even if it’s just pro­duc­tion work, Logo Lounge should be book or books that you have.

How­ever if you want access to even more logo good­ness you really need to check out the Logo Lounge web­site. It is a paid mem­ber­ship web site, but you get access to 1000’s of logos that didn’t make it into the books and it’s mem­bers are always upload­ing new logos that have been cre­ated, just for that it’s well worth the cost.

Both the book and the web site are huge trea­sure troves of ref­er­ence, research and resource mate­r­ial. I feel the amount of research any designer does before design­ing any­thing plays into the qual­ity of the finial prod­uct and the more research the bet­ter. And with that idea in mind, Logo Lounge helps logo research in count­less ways. Which makes it a must have for any designer’s library in my opinion.

One fun lit­tle story, I got a chance to meet Bill Gard­ner, one of the authors of the Logo Lounge Series, a few years ago on a AIGA trip from Kansas State to Wichita, KS where he is based. We more just got to tour his design stu­dio and really didn’t talk to much about the series, it was still fun to meet one of the two peo­ple be hide the series.

Links

• LogoLounge 1
• LogoLounge 2
• LogoLounge 3
• LogoLounge 4
• LogoLounge 5